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Topic: What kind of RGB lights are used in PCs (Read 241 times)

This does not have much to do with Christmas lighting, but it does have to do with RGB lights, and I figured if anyone would know the answer, it would be this group.

I am building a new PC using the new AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32 core CPU, and and I plan on pimping it out with water cooling, LEDs and the like. The motherboard has headers for 5V or 12V RGB strips, the motherboard manufacturer, Gigabyte, uses software they call"RGB Fusion" to control them. Other manufacturers have their own proprietary software such as "Mystic Light", and "Aura Sync".

The headers on the motherboard are four-pin headers, but only three of the pins are used. Sounds like V+, Gnd, and Data to me, much like WS2811. Does anyone know if these are WS2811, or if not, what they are?

The motherboard manual only states that the strips are 5050 addressable digital strips. There are many brands of LED strips sold exclusively for PC builds, with a hefty mark up of course, but if they are WS2811, I have plenty of those around.

The 5050 strips they talk about are WS2812b (integrated chip on back of the 5050 LED).100% WS2811 protocol.

If those three pins aren't labeled well, just check their voltage with a multimeter. Should be 12v+, 5v but fluctuating, and 0v on the ground pin.

Being that 2812 is 5V only I would think the voltages would be 5V, 1V (ish), 0V. The data signal I guesstimated at 1V but could be anything from very close to 0V to close to 2.5V if there's lots of pixels configured, the refresh rate is high and the colour is white.

Are those lights/pixels "individually controlled", such as smart pixels? If not, could the 4 pins be for something akin to "dumb pixels" where 1 pin is V+ and the other three are V- for the individual colors?